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A key question with which many senior executives struggle concerns the development of future generations of leaders throughout their organizations. Because these senior leaders realize that they cannot personally groom these next generations of leaders, they have started to explore what conditions will make the leaders of the future “emerge.” They face the challenge of creating conditions that simultaneously provide opportunities for people to demonstrate their leadership potential and that keep the current business running well. Day, in Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the book, proposed the social architecture most conducive to such leader development. His social architecture has three main pillars: low power distance, psychological safety, and a learning orientation. The two application chapters in this part of the book presented two ways of building such a social architecture for leader development.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that explains how individual organizational members' self‐construction processes motivate them to support or reject decoupling as a form of resistance to institutionally mandated change.

Most studies have looked at powerful organizational actors and top management teams that decide to decouple. This paper broadens the understanding through a micro‐level approach that focuses on the role of individual members within organizations. Specifically, it looks at what happens inside organizations after the decision to decouple has been taken.

This paper identifies three alternative self‐identity construction pathways that members may choose following the decision of an organization to decouple: strong identification with the organization; strong identification with the institutional pressure; and adoption of both organizational and institutional identities. The framework specifies how and under which conditions the way individuals identify and manage identity multiplicity impacts organizational resistance to change.

Future research could test the proposed framework particularly through case studies or qualitative designs that look deep into organizational processes and individual attitudes towards decoupling.

Practitioners, particularly top management teams, can adopt a moderating role in influencing the identification process of their employees. They can also communicate better why efficiency is more important than the mandated changes, and why decoupling must be supported to safeguard the organization's “efficient” identity.

The paper integrates institutional theory's macro‐perspectives with micro‐perspectives of individual members' identity and self‐construction processes within organizations. It contributes to existing institutional accounts of agentic change and resistance to change through a dynamic framework that prescribes individual interests and preferences based on identification processes.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptual comprehensive framework to analyze synergy management pitfalls in mergers and acquisitions (M & As). The framework highlights the main dimensions of synergy management, the most relevant synergy pitfalls and the ways to overcome them.

A greater recognition of synergy management literature in M & As is developed. A framework is provided integrating the compatible elements of previous broad areas of research and the main findings of studies on several topics related to synergy.

Prior literature has suggested that synergy is an important motivation of M & As, has tended to be overestimated and has been difficult to achieve. Specifically, there are three relevant synergy pitfalls: the “mirage,” a tendency to overestimate synergy potential, the “gravity hill,” the underestimation of the difficulties in synergy realization and “amnesia,” a dangerous lack of attention to the realization of synergy. An effective synergy management requires an analysis of five dimensions: the steps of the M & A process, the several values of synergy, the forbidding effects of poor synergy management, the potential causes of synergy inflation and the selection of solutions to synergy pitfalls.

The comprehensive framework suggests insights and guidelines to help managers to overcome pitfalls in synergy management. Managers will learn the following lessons: “when” pitfalls should embrace synergy management; “where” pitfalls may occur; “why” pitfalls may occur; “what” consequences can result in a value of “realized synergy” lower than the “expected synergy”; and “how” actions, tools and behaviors can overcome hidden dangers in synergy management.

The study changes the focus from a single, generic synergy trap to three more analytical, useful synergy pitfalls: the mirage, the gravity hill and the amnesia. By shedding light on synergy management pitfalls, this paper enriches M & A literature and enhance practical solutions to reduce pitfalls in synergy decision making.